Getting to Happily Ever After
I'm a romance novel junkie. Give me those Regency dukes and ladies any day (though I draw the line at vampire lords - sorry, paranormal fans). It started with Sweet Valley High in middle school, where I was definitely Team Elizabeth (I was too much of an good girl to be team Jessica). From there, it was a slippery slope through Harlequins to Johanna Lindsey and beyond.
Looking back, it's no mystery why teenage-me devoured these books. Here I was, a South Asian girl with raging hormones and secret crushes, while living inside of a totally different culture of love at home. Like the huge majority of marriages in my culture, my parents had an arranged marriage. They also had the world's most efficient relationship timeline: met December 19, married December 26, flew to America on January 5. Talk about speed-dating!
Being raised in the US, I was caught between what I knew was normal in my community and what I wanted for myself based on being raised in the US. That meant I absorbed messages that were often deeply contradictory:
Parents need to approve of your partner. Growing up on stories from my community of having brides be “checked out” by other members of the family for approval, I held a deep belief that my parents/family would need to approve of the person I married.
This ended up okay for me, as my family DID approve of the person I married, but for many South Asian, API and other folks of color who marry outside their religion, culture, or race or who are queer, marrying the person you love can come with the very real concern about being cut off from family.
There is no way to win the Dating Paradox (Or: How to Find a Spouse Without Ever Dating People). According to cultural logic in more conservative dating cultures, you should:
Focus 100% on education which means…
Not dating until you're done with school but then be able to…
Magically produce a perfect spouse without dating and…
Do all this before you hit your "expiration date" (more on this later).
Living with someone was out of the question. The idea of living with someone without being married is deeply taboo in many cultures. And it’s especially taboo for women, where messages of purity and chastity are deeply embedded in women’s worthiness.
Many immigrant children fully hide the fact that they live with someone. Mementos and refrigerator photos get packed up and boyfriends/girlfriends move out while parents visit (and stay at their child’s house). The stress of having family drop by unannounced or having family visit can be a significant and normal part of life in your 20s and 30s.
Watch your expiration date. There’s simultaneous and contradictory messages that you should focus on your career, live at home until you are married, but somehow find a human to marry without dating them long term or living with them. For many women, you can avoid questions from your aunties or family friends until you are done with school or in your first or second job, but then you start hearing versions of “You are not getting any younger, beta” or “Don’t be too picky or all the good one’s will be gone.”
These questions and judgement are usually left for women, men can seemingly be single forever without incurring concerns of “being on the shelf” (wink to the romance readers!).
As we enter a hyped up season of romantic love with Valentine’s Day around the corner, I’m thinking about how this holiday can be so complicated for so many of us whose stories fall outside the traditional meet-cute romance trope. Getting to our own happily-ever-afters may require guts, going against tradition, compromise with our partners, and conflict with our families. It’s not an easy story, but it is a love story worth fighting for.
